Nobel winner learned of prize on the street

LONDON — It took a state-of-the-art accelerator to prove his theories right, but Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs says he learned of his award in physics the old-fashioned way: Word on the street.

Higgs says he was walking down the street in Edinburgh when a former neighbor got out of her car to congratulate him on the news.

"I said, 'Oh, what news?'" Higgs told reporters on Friday.

The Nobel couldn't have come as a complete surprise. Higgs was widely tipped to win the prize after his theory about how subatomic particles get their mass was proven right by experiments at CERN, a giant particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border.

Higgs, speaking at a press conference in the Scottish capital, stressed that other theorists were also involved in the discovery.